A number of systems and programs are offered on the market for the design, the engineering and the manufacturing of objects. CAD is an acronym for Computer-Aided Design, e.g. it relates to software solutions for designing an object. CAE is an acronym for Computer-Aided Engineering, e.g. it relates to software solutions for simulating the physical behavior of a future product. CAM is an acronym for Computer-Aided Manufacturing, e.g. it relates to software solutions for defining manufacturing processes and operations. In such computer-aided design systems, the graphical user interface plays an important role as regards the efficiency of the technique. These techniques may be embedded within Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems. PLM refers to a business strategy that helps companies to share product data, apply common processes, and leverage corporate knowledge for the development of products from conception to the end of their life, across the concept of extended enterprise.
The PLM solutions provided by Dassault Systèmes (under the trademarks CATIA, ENOVIA and DELMIA) provide an Engineering Hub, which organizes product engineering knowledge, a Manufacturing Hub, which manages manufacturing engineering knowledge, and an Enterprise Hub which enables enterprise integrations and connections into both the Engineering and Manufacturing Hubs. All together the system delivers an open object model linking products, processes, resources to enable dynamic, knowledge-based product creation and decision support that drives optimized product definition, manufacturing preparation, production and service.
In CAD systems, bounding volume are widely used, for example for the purposes of culling or intersection tests. Typical bounding volumes are for example cubes, cylinder boxes or spheres. Generally speaking, the creation of bounding volumes relies only on the product structure of an assembly of 3D modeled object such that each 3D modeled object is enclosed in its own bounding box. However, a division of an assembly that relies only on the product structure is not always adapted when the purpose of bounding boxes is not culling or intersection tests. For instance, bounding boxes might be used for the purpose of manipulating the assembly.
Within this context, there is still a need for improving the creation a set of bounding boxes on a three-dimensional modeled assembly in a three-dimensional scene.